2024-09-29, 13:50–14:20 (Europe/Zurich), Main Stage
While AI image generation tools appear to be undeniably professional at hallucinating the biases of their datasets into their pixelated outputs, they are lacking when it comes to producing accurate images of graphical user interfaces (GUIs), either of smartphones or computer operating systems. Perhaps this suggests that, in a world of AI-generated images, screenshots are more trustworthy than regular photographs, and that GUIs are less deceptive than one might think.
Based on text-to-image experiments with Dall-E, the presentation shows how AI fails to produce images that represent the smartphone GUI and successively introduces the concept of Interface Hallucinations. It proposes screenshots and screen recordings taken while photographing with a smartphone as a low-tech method of hacking the distribution of misinformation. These "Proofs of Screens" might be poor in quality, but strong in meaning. In this way Interface Hallucinations intersects the disciplines of AI criticism and interface studies with critical and participatory journalism and activism, raising the question of what it means to produce true images, broadening the discourse beyond the field of artificial intelligence.
Till Rückwart is a research associate at the Culture and Media Management Programm at Freie Universität Berlin and researcher at metaLAB (at) Berlin. His artistic research practice draws on flaws and errors to engage speculative and critically with the interdependencies of media, society, and the environment. Currently he is doing his PhD in Visual Culture at the Institute for Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, emphasizing errors and bugs in AI-related software as socio-technical phenomena.